{"doi":"10.1016/j.bpsgos.2025.100525","title":"Mediating Role of Trauma Connecting Psychiatric Family History and Adolescent Mental Health","abstract":"Adolescent mental health is influenced by family history. Experiences of trauma also convey substantial risk for mental health challenges. Mediation of the association of family history with adolescent mental health by trauma experiences could be actionable and warrants evaluation. We sought to interrogate the mediating role of trauma in the association of psychiatric family history (FH) with adolescent general psychopathology, accounting for shared environment and genetics. The Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort was a cross-sectional study of participants aged 8 to 21 with English fluency, in good medical health with characterization from November 2009 through December 2011. Analysis reported here was completed from March 2023 through February 2025. Among 7840 participants, we tested associations of first-degree FH (category count [0-4]: psychosis, mood, suicide attempt, substance use), youth exposure to trauma, neighborhood environment (block-level geocoded socioeconomic indices), and genomic factor of polygenic scores for psychopathologies (depression, PTSD, schizophrenia, bipolar, cross-disorder) with adolescent general psychopathology modeled as P-factor. Association of FH with general psychopathology was assessed with structural equation modeling, querying for an indirect pathway via trauma, with stepwise accounting of genomics and shared environment, controlling for age and sex. Of 7,840 participants, 31% had FH and trauma exposure was reported in 44% of youth. Trauma had substantial direct association with general psychopathology and consistently mediated more than 20% of variance from FH to psychopathology, accounting for neighborhood and genomic predisposition. Trauma exposures mediate a substantial portion of association between FH and adolescent psychopathology, an opportunity for transgenerational intervention. One potentially modifiable environmental risk factor for youth mental health is early-life exposure to traumatic stressful experiences (trauma). Many studies have reported associations of trauma exposure with psychiatric illness, including in adolescence.( 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 ) Moreover, caregiver ill mental health has been shown to increase risk for child trauma exposures.( 13 ) It is also critical to consider the complex network structure of environment (exposome), whereby individual-level adversity often co-occurs with structural stressors.( 14 ) For example, the likelihood of trauma exposure may be influenced by neighborhood environment such as through frequency of violent crime.( 15 )","journal":"Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science","year":2025,"id":552604,"datarank":0.10397207708399181,"base_score":0.6931471805599453,"endowment":0.6931471805599453,"self_citation_contribution":0.10397207708399181,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.10397207708399181,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9513,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":796000,"name":"Jamie L. Catalano","orcid":"0000-0002-7822-590X","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":806458,"name":"Laura M. Schultz","orcid":"0000-0001-7506-8235","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":24671,"name":"Laura Almasy","orcid":"0000-0002-9184-8124","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":668656,"name":"Elina Visoki","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":52331,"name":"Jakob Seidlitz","orcid":"0000-0002-8164-7476","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":235289,"name":"Tyler M. Moore","orcid":"0000-0002-1384-0151","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":460732,"name":"Jerome H. Taylor","orcid":"0000-0003-2787-6232","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":263910,"name":"Monica E. Calkins","orcid":"0000-0002-0546-0263","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":230042,"name":"Raquel E. Gur","orcid":"0000-0002-4082-8502","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":640230,"name":"Ran Barzilay","orcid":"0000-0002-3247-2331","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":870084,"name":"Barbara H. Chaiyachati","orcid":"0000-0001-7324-6245","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":74,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:54:33.203144Z","pmid":"40575350","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}